Subject: Re: I want to learn LISP
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/10/13
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3117248157194543@naggum.no>
* Viktor Haag <viktor@peergroup.com>
| Is Emacs-Lisp considered a reasonable way to "learn Lisp"? I know that
| Emacs-Lisp is a different dialect to Common Lisp, but do you serious
| Lispers consider it as "reasonable"?
I have worked intimately with Emacs since 1993 and fixed a lot of bugs
and tried very hard to keep Emacs Lisp reasonable. by 1996, I gave up
that goal, but not the usefulness of Emacs, and I have since then worked
on a private version of Emacs that has tracked the development version of
Emacs sans MULE and other bad design decisions. unsurprisingly, almost
all the bugs in recent development have been in the areas I decided were
broken at the core, but worse, yet, the fixes made are even worse than
what they tried to fix.
Emacs Lisp for Emacs 19 is still reasonable (the latest version being
19.34). Emacs Lisp for Emacs 20 is no longer reasonable. (e.g., the
lack of a character type, streams, filters, etc, makes MULE amazingly
stupidly designed, and lots of other advanced features are incredibly
kludgey because the language is no longer able to support further
development.)
XEmacs Lisp appears to be closer to Common Lisp. I have previously
thought XEmacs was worse than Emacs in the "if we haven't reinvented it,
it can't be any good" department, but it appears that XEmacs will not
follow Emacs over to Guile, although I think XEmacs Lisp has more of a
Scheme nature than Emacs Lisp with its myriads of accessors and other
one-trick ponies.
all in all, I think you should learn Emacs Lisp because it is so useful
for a wide range of tasks, but depressingly little in Emacs Lisp is
really smart, so you should at least consider implementing most of the
stuff yourself in Common Lisp.
#:Erik